Thoughts on food, travel, politics, entertainment, culture, and other absurdities of human existence.

Thursday, August 27, 2009

Shut Up and Sing, Madonna

I wouldn't say her message deserved to be booed - racial prejudice is, most people agree, a bad thing. But I must confess some small degree of pleasure in seeing a crowd respond with something other than fawning adulation to sanctimonious grandstanding by a celebrity. Though her feelings about discrimination may be genuine, I doubt Madonna has put much time or effort into understanding the plight of the Roma in eastern Europe, or into doing anything that might ameliorate it. People at that concert paid to see her sing and dance, not deliver a political sermon, so for her to use her platform as a performer to do the latter (particularly on a subject of which she has only dim understanding) is fairly obnoxious.

We pay celebrities to entertain us, not worry their pretty little heads about social problems. The people who matter vis-a-vis the situation of Gypsies in Romania are the people on the ground, Gypsy and non-Gypsy, trying to improve it, not preachy celebrity interlopers.